Shopping carts are commonly provided for the convenience of customers of business establishments, such as supermarkets, drug stores, hardware stores, or the like, so that the customer can store the goods he desires to purchase from the business establishment in the shopping cart. The shopping cart is generally pushed around the inside of the store by a customer while viewing the goods stored on the store shelves and selecting those goods that are to be purchased. The selected goods are stored in the shopping cart as they are selected and the cart is pushed along the aisles between the shelves of the store until all the goods desired to be purchased are stored in the cart. The customer, then, pushes the shopping cart laden with all the goods he desires to purchase to a checkout counter to be priced by a checkout clerk for purchase and payment by the customer. The checkout operation generally entails unloading the goods from the shopping cart onto the checkout counter so that each item can be individually priced and accounted for, item by item. The goods are then generally bagged or boxed by a box boy during the checkout procedure and the bags or boxes are placed into a shopping cart. After the purchase of the goods, the cart laden with the bags or boxes holding the customer's acquired goods is pushed out of the store into the parking lot, or parking area, to the customer's motor vehicle, which is usually parked adjacent the business establishment. The bags, then, are unloaded by the customer or the box boy from the shopping cart into the motor vehicle for transfer to the customer's destination. It is customary in the types of business establishments providing the shopping carts for the convenience of the customers to also provide a shopping cart corral in the parking area, or lot, for the customer to return their empty shopping cart for storage. A shopping cart corral is basically an area defined between longitudinally arranged rails that provide a chute to permit the customer to push the shopping cart into this area for storage and retention therein. The use of the shopping cart corral by the business establishments is desired so as to eliminate the abandonment of the shopping carts all over the parking area by the customers where they may be easily damaged by motor vehicles traveling and/or parking in the parking area. The box boys or other employees of the business establishment can more readily return the carts to the inside of the store for reuse by other customers by pushing the carts that have been pushed into the shopping cart corral or store. This also saves the time of the store employees that would be required to round up all the shopping carts that may have been left at various locations in the parking area.
Present day shopping cart corrals are constructed of tubular elements such as pipes for defining two side rails for each side of the corral. The side rails have a minimum length of at least ten feet that are welded into an integral structure as a single solid side unit for each side of the corral. The ten foot side rail sections are difficult to handle, are bulky and costly to ship. Since the corral is exposed to a variety of environmental conditions, it has been found that the pipes or tubular elements utilized for constructing the shopping cart corral will rust. This resulted in the stores specifying the use of galvanized tubing for the construction of the corrals, so as to prevent the rusting thereof. When these side sections of a present day shopping cart corral are welded together, they are too large to be galvanized as a unit and, as a result, it was necessary to resort to the use of pre-galvanized tubing and then arc welding the galvanized tubing into the side rail sections. The welding of galvanized tubing, however, produced fumes that are a health hazard to the arc welder and are unpopular with the welder. The welding operation also resulted in burning off a galvanized area near the weld joint that required a rust-protective coating thereon. One protective coating that was utilized is aluminum paint. In the use of the aluminum paint to replace the burned off galvanized area, it has been found to still permit rust to form through the paint in a short period of time, resulting in continuous complaints from the business establishments utilizing shopping cart corrals of the specified construction. With present day shopping cart corrals, in the event a motor vehicle strikes and damages any portion of a shopping cart corral, it is necessary to replace the entire side rail section that has been damaged due to its unitary welded construction. Stated differently, the entire damaged side rail unit has to be replaced with a new side rail assembly which was costly to the business establishment. Present day shopping cart corrals generally have a fixed length and width that can't be varied. The side rails are also formed at the front end of the corral with an L-shaped bend and an inverted U-shape at the rear end. The L-shaped configuration for the front end of present day shopping cart corrals for the side rails have been found to spread at the top front of the rail after continued use.
The present invention provides an improved shopping cart corral that is constructed and defined of modular elements so that they may be shipped in kit form and the modular elements may be readily assembled by the personnel of the business establishment without requiring specialized skills. The modular elements or component parts for the kit are constructed and defined as complementary interfitting elements that may be secured together with rivets that may readily and tightly secure the component interfitting parts of the kit with the mere use of a simple, common hammer. The method of fastening also is advantageously defined to leave no sharp edges exposed which could result in injury to the assemblers or the customers and/or employees of the business establishment. This improved method of assembly eliminates the need for arc welding of galvanized tubing and its attendant health hazards. In view of the modular construction, the modular elements, the fastening elements, and associated parts comprising the shopping cart corral it can be stored in a shipping carton that may be easily handled and shipped at relatively lower costs than can prior art structures. This method of shipping the component parts of the corral in unassembled form permits the jobbers to store the cartons in bulk form and then reshipping the cartons to the store or business establishment requiring a shopping cart corral. The modular elements of the kit are constructed of galvanized tubing of a preselected small size so that the individual components permit a plastic color coating to be placed thereon over the galvanized surface. This allows the color for the shopping cart corral to be selected for matching the decor of the stores or business establishments. It is not possible with present day corral rail sections to place them in the plastic color coating tanks that are commercially available since the rail sections for present day shopping cart corrals are too large (approximately 10 feet long) to fit into the color coating tanks. By combining a plastic coating in combination with the galvanized tubing in accordance with the present invention, in the event the plastic chips off a component part, there still is the galvanized coating underneath and so rust is essentially nonexistent in utilizing the component parts of the present invention. In addition, due to the modular construction, and the ease with which the component parts may be disassembled as a result of the use of a specialized rivet, any damage to a side portion of the shopping cart corral permits repair of the corral by the replacement only of the damaged modular component or components, rather than a whole side section, as in the prior art constructions. Due to the use of the specialized rivets, the damaged component or components can be readily removed by the maintenance personnel of the business establishment to replace the damaged component part or parts very readily in a very short time; thereby resulting in a savings in time, and substantial costs to the business establishment. In one particular construction of the module components the joints are formed by complementary interfitting parts so that the ends of the components may be partially telescoped, while other component parts are interfitted by partially wrapping one end of one component around the circular periphery of a coacting part. These interfitted complementary parts may be permanently secured together by a drive rivet that has a pin that may be driven by a common hammer by a maintenance crew of the business establishment so as to secure the parts together, both readily and simply. The assembled shopping cart corral has also been improved by providing a more rigid construction in that the front and rear elements are formed by two U-shaped end components in combination with intermediate post members assembled in a unit that provides a solid box-like construction to the assembled corral and, therefore, avoiding the problems of prior art corral structures.